My new listening/reading/studying regimen. Kind of.

I’m right on track to read 40 books this year, and I’m really excited about that. ALL I want is to reach 40. And I’ll be happy, since then I’ll have beat my number from 2014: 39.

books!

With that in mind, I should really be reading or listening to books as often as I can. I’ve got a good system now, in which I listen to audiobooks on my way to work. I have a few left to go, and a few actual books sitting in my shelf to read after that.

But I’m having an issue at the moment, and I want to try to solve the problem: I bought Rosetta Stone for Japanese in like APRIL, and I have yet to even launch the program on my computer.

I had this grand idea that on our days off, Mark and I would wake up and spend an hour or so learning Japanese, before getting out of bed and into our days. That hasn’t happened, and I’m starting to get a bit frustrated by it. On one hand, I really want us to learn together, so our levels will be about the same. On the other hand, I feel like I’m not pushing to do this enough, so maybe I should do it on my own, in the small amounts of free time I happen to have.

Before we even moved to Japan, I’d subscribed to some Japanese podcasts so I could practice while flying on a plane, walking around, etc. At first I really wasn’t too excited about them, since I generally need visuals to go along with my learning, and specifically, I need to see the way a word is written or spelled in order to better understand the pronunciation. So the podcasts on their own didn’t feel like they would be enough. More like ‘something extra’ I could do.

THEN I learned that the podcasts I was using actually had lessons and texts online. And now everything is better. I can listen to the podcast on my way to work and study when I get in or have some spare time. The learning model is a lot like the one the school I teach for uses: phrases and conversation. But that’s enough to survive and understand the basic grammar, I think.

There may or may not be some kind of ‘free trial’ period, and that might change my mind, if they want me to pay for it later. We’ll see what happens in a few days, I guess. For now, it’s great.

So now I’m trying to split my time between podcasts and studying, and listening to audiobooks. I WANT to beat 40 books, but I think it’s also important to be able to ask questions at a restaurant and talk to the random delivery people who call me on the phone.

I’ve tried to make plans and a routine in the past, and I think I’m just not that good at them. Living in Japan, I’ve learned a LOT more about working in seasons rather than schedules. More on that later. But I think right now, I might be in a ‘season’ for practicing Japanese at work. Maybe.